5/14/2009 @ 1:13PM

An (Internet) Day Without Google

BURLINGAME, Calif. — For too many minutes there, it seemed like the air left the room.

Products from
Google
, including search, e-mail, calendars and advertising services appear to have failed for over an hour for millions of users around the globe on Thursday. The source and extent of the problem was unclear, but the disruption lasted over an hour, apparently affecting users in California, New York, Denver, Boston and Miami, among others reporting results to the ReadWriteWeb site. Users in China, India and the U.K. said they were unaffected. Berlin appeared to be down.

It was not clear whether the problem grew from a malicious hack, a goof at Google or a failure on the part of one or another of Google’s telecommunications partners. “We are aware some users are having trouble accessing some Google services,” said spokesman Gabriel Stricker. “We’re looking into it, and we’ll update everyone soon.”

For users of the service, though, none of that mattered. The real issue was access to now-vital tools for work and life. And the glaring question was, Have we become too dependent on single large providers of our services?

The Internet was built to sustain basic communications despite a nuclear attack, but evolved into an architecture for providing a multitude of services to millions of people from a few large sources. Increasingly, outfits like Google,
Microsoft
,
Yahoo!
and
Amazon
promise to centralize more and more things, from e-mail to inventories and complex calculations, all in an Internet “cloud.”

It seems cheap and good enough, but now more clearly raises the prospect of widespread failures as well. An office that goes down due to failures in a Microsoft server is one office down, affecting at most thousands. It is baked into an annoying cost of doing business. A system dependent on Google services touches millions, and raises concerns about future insecurity.

Thursday’s failure was unlikely to affect Google’s near-term business deeply. Features such as Gmail and the word processing Google Docs program are offered for free and sold to companies in premium versions, but those revenues amount to less than 2% of Google’s annual revenues. Google’s service agreement promises uptime of 99.9%, which sounds great, but gives them 525 minutes a year when it can be down. Thursday’s failure ate maybe 15% of that. The stock fell slightly, then recovered after the outage appeared to end, as investors judged the effect on Google’s mainline advertising business to be modest.

Of greater concern is what the outage implies for trust in cloud computing services, the biggest hope for the tech industry as it moves out of its slump.